Chapter 7: Regulating Life

She would call a locksmith the next day and get all of the locks changed. Then Hayden had walked through her clean home taking stock and if she found something that reminded her of MyKell, she threw it in the garbage, including the workout pants and t-shirt that had once belonged to him. Instead of feeling sad or hurt, now she just felt closure.

By the end of week two, Hayden had returned to the doctor and found that she had lost nine pounds. Todd was happy about it, but she felt that it should have been more. She had worked hard and though her pants were a bit baggier, she still thought she looked like the same unkempt fat woman. She barely even looked in the mirror; she had trained herself to see only the things that she needed to in order to not walk around with lettuce stuck in her teeth or toilet paper hanging from the back of her pants.

Todd's way of celebrating her accomplishments was to allow her to leave the treadmill but she now had to use the recumbent bike for half an hour. Somehow she thought that by sitting it would be easier, but that was not true. The weekend was the only time that Hayden had for herself. After she gave Todd his pound of flesh on Saturday or Sunday, she took care of cleaning her home, paying bills, or visiting with Dani. Then it was time to prepare for the upcoming week; preparing her meals, getting her clothes together so that she wouldn't have to dash around wondering what to wear when she had not a minute to spare in the morning, and not an ounce of energy left in the evening.

She had her life regulated down to the minute. It allowed her sweet emptiness, mindless activity where she had no time to think about anything beyond the task at hand. It was hard, but it was also slowly healing her.

Time might heal old wounds—but so did focusing on something more unpleasant like knotted muscles, a grumbling belly and total exhaustion. The only thing she couldn't quite regulate was the last office that she had to clean each night. At times they worked until 10:00 P.M. and she had to sit in her car silently stewing that she wouldn't be in bed until midnight.

It wouldn't do her any good to clean while they were still present if they were going to refill the ashtrays that she'd just cleaned, or piss on the floor of the restroom that she'd just mopped! To say that she was annoyed by it all would be an understatement. A few times, she had even fallen asleep behind her steering wheel, which was bad. Yet worse was when her mind would begin to wander back to MyKell.

Hayden watched the lady with the 1950s' bouffant hairstyle leave the office, using her key to lock up. Stifling a yawn, Hayden brushed past the older woman who gave her a suspicious look. Hayden used her own janitorial service issued key to unlock the just locked door, ignoring the woman who had stopped to watch her as she entered the large office.

Hayden moved quickly, dumping the trash and huffing under her breath. When these people left their cubicles for the night, they also left half eaten food and drinks on their desks and they left their chairs almost halfway out into the aisle. Well she wasn't supposed to touch anything on anyone's desk—even if it was a bunch of sticky napkins from where someone had made a half-hearted attempt to clean up a spill.

It gave her a new appreciation for her own workstation at her fulltime job. Now she made double sure to keep the liner in place and to push her chair up to her desk at the end of the day. There were 26 cubicles in this office and it took a chunk of the night to get all of the chairs pushed up to their desks so that she could get to her vacuuming. Of the 26 cubicles, there were three that remained neat and she was grateful that some people had apparent home training.

She hadn't been the least bit curious about what they did here. She knew a boiler room when she saw one. They were a bunch of telemarketers. How many similar places had she dropped off or picked up MyKell from? Jobs like this had a high turn around so who cared if the carpet under your feet was stained, especially when the guy sitting next to you was probably living out of his car and hadn't bathed in days? Telemarketing was a job of fast money and lots of… sitting.

Contemplating her sore hamstrings, Hayden suddenly thought of a solution. She returned to the manager's office that she had just cleaned. She tried reading the faded stenciling on the outside of the door but FOX, VINYL, and A S was all that she could make out. So she snooped around the messy desk only long enough to write down the phone number and name of the company.

Cleaning this pigsty wasn't worth the small amount of pay that she was getting. Maybe she would fare better working sales. MyKell had done it for years and she knew the ends and outs of it, though she'd never sold anything in her life. Yet if MyKell could do it, then she sure as hell could too. So the next day, Hayden called the owner of the company, Robert Fox. He gave her an impromptu interview over the phone.

"You have a very pleasant phone voice Miss Michaels. I understand that you've never done sales before, but we have a script and I think you will do fine. If you like, you can begin tomorrow, and I see no reason why you wouldn't be able to work later in the evening. After all, we have customers on the West coast. Miss Michaels, welcome aboard."